Have you figured out yet why Zuckerburg won't let his own kids use any of his products?
>“Congresswoman, My daughters are five and three and they do not use our products. Actually that is not exactly true my eldest daughter, Max, I let use Messenger Kids sometimes to message her cousins,” said Mr Zuckerberg.
Get those phones out of your kids hands. Socially, they are growing up on a diet of sugar.
It absolutely has. I maintain that without social media, which simultaneously provided a way into everyone's thoughts, and also contented people with a feeling of connectedness while living under house arrest conditions of historic proportions, people would have simply rejected the whole campaign of Covid restrictions.
Quarantines and lockdowns have been used throughout history to combat epidemics, with great success. Why do you think that the only thing that made people accept the latest ones is social media?
Your other comment got removed, probably for being overtly hostile and lacking in any objective facts or evidence. Here is my reply anyway:
The IFR of Covid overall is very low (0.4%, by some estimates). If you are under 50, it's basically not worth worrying about. Is that the BS you are talking about? Find me some actual numbers on those things you describe, and not just fear-laden imagery spread in the media and online, or I'll stick to my opinions of who is spreading BS.
My local health district currently is at 75% capacity. It has also treated fewer patients than average every month since March 2020. In fact, my country turned out huge numbers of old folks into nursing homes where they all spread Covid and died while we were shut up in our houses to "protect grannie". Blindly following the "protect the hospitals" mantra has caused huge healthcare issues where I live (UK), and will possibly cause the failure of our socialised healthcare system as we know it. Hospitals currently have single-digit percentages of Covid patients, yet cannot get anyone else treated because of the absurd amount of Covid restrictions. In my principality (Wales), it was recently published that the backlog of cancer patients will take a decade to clear (obviously, those patients will just die).
It was quite quickly discovered that the most effective care for a Covid patient was fairly simple - bed rest, and low-flow oxygen. Healthcare was not limited by bed numbers or equipment.
> Find me some actual numbers on those things you describe, and not just fear-laden imagery spread in the media and online, or I'll stick to my opinions of who is spreading BS.
So you think that the makeshift morgues and people dying in the streets was just a media operation? Hospitals were over capacity in many places, if you have a hard time believing this you really are trying to hard to ignore reality.
All in French, but Google Translate should help you. The column you're searching for is TO (Taux d'occupation, occupancy rate). You can see it's over 1 many times, in many different regions, for weeks at a time. And this is in a country that did heavy lockdowns the first two times, and then very strict curfews (18h at one time). It doesn't matter that for people under 50 in perfect health the mortality rate is minimal - if the hospitals and emergency services are over capacity, those people can't get help for anything. And of course that's discounting the fact that even many U50s have comorbidities.
> It was quite quickly discovered that the most effective care for a Covid patient was fairly simple - bed rest, and low-flow oxygen. Healthcare was not limited by bed numbers or equipment.
And where do those beds and oxygen come from? Are they not "bed numbers and equipment"?
Your country is an unmitigated disaster managed by clowns. And even they realised that lockdowns are needed after weeks of insisting on the opposite. Why do you think that is?
Which makeshift morgues? Which people dying in the streets? Remember that video from China in early 2020, showing people literally dropping in the street? You can't be talking about that, surely.
>And where do those beds and oxygen come from? Are they not "bed numbers and equipment"?
Remember how I explained that the total number of patients treated every month in the UK since March 2020 is less than average?[1] It very clearly follows that we were not limited by beds.
>Your country is an unmitigated disaster managed by clowns.
Yet it has a Covid mortality rate per capita of around the same as most other developed countries. Admittedly a little on the high side, although the US has now overtaken the UK in recent months. Certainly about the same as France and Spain.
[1] https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/sta..., click on the link under "Provisional Monthly Hospital Episode Statistics for Admitted Patient Care and Outpatients Dashboard ", and then go to page 2 of the silly web app. Observe how the NHS runs at near 100% capacity, until March 2020, when it has run consistently less than that (and continues to do so).
In the US the treatments are absolutely limited by bed availability. And towing around a statistic like "less people are being treated" is the entire point the not shill world is trying to make. Do you know why less people are being treated? Because the beds are full of people with COVID and hospitalized COVID patients take longer to treat than most other hospital stays. So the beds are being filled and not emptied at regular rates leading to less people being treated. Maybe it's extremely different in the UK but here in the US people with your attitude are a huge problem.
To pick out two dates, roughly at each Covid peak:
16 Apr 2020: 3,033 general beds occupied, 3,200 general beds available. 190 ICU beds used, 204 ICU beds available.
25th Jan 2021: 7,840 general beds occupied, 1,459 general beds available. 218 ICU beds used, 49 ICU beds available.
The publicly-available statistics do not support the notion that our hospitals are in dire straights due to sheer numbers of patients, nor the idea that they were full to bursting with Covid patients. As I have said repeatedly, they were emptier than usual.
Further, denigrating anyone who disagrees with you as "shrill" does you no favours.
Edit: Hopefully you understand why I'm upset about this topic. I suffered with a very young family under effective house arrest for many months, and many further months of restrictions (some of which are ongoing), as well as the inevitable long-term effects on my country, all to "protect the NHS". As the figures clearly show, at the peak of the first wave, the hospitals were less than 50% full.
The immediate question is - what on earth else has gone wrong?
Has it occurred to you that the statistics for Wales only might not be telling the same story? How were the hospitals in England and Scotland? Considering it would be impossible to force a quarantine between them, a global UK policy wasn't a ludicrous idea. Furthermore, the point of the restrictions was to stop the exponential growth before hospitals were overwhelmed.
> Edit: Hopefully you understand why I'm upset about this topic. I suffered with a very young family under effective house arrest for many months, and many further months of restrictions (some of which are ongoing), as well as the inevitable long-term effects on my country, all to "protect the NHS
And many many others did, but don't bitch about it for months on end.
Months? I'm going to be paying for this folly, probably for the rest of my working life.
I thought you told me that we couldn't compare numbers between different countries, what with them being different and all? Wales is an especially interesting case, because we had significantly more onerous restrictions than England (and if I lived in England, I might not have such a strong opinion that the downsides of lockdowns outweigh the benefits).
As you absolutely insist though, here's the data for England:
Because they all feel a need to deny that people willingly participating have both agency and practical intelligence. Agency you make decisions and act on them. Practical intelligence means being able to weigh risks and your own knowledge to make appropriately hedged bets.
And another thing people engaging in prosocial mitigations have seen that they actually work and thus feel a sense of control over the situation. That in particular rankles political and public health leaders, and especially rankles covid denialists.
Has Canada, a territory of extremely low population density, been under strict stay-at-home orders - prohibiting not "to see other people", but just to leave the house? I remember the months-old anecdote of a policeman accusing a driver, while fining him, to have put the community at risk, because in case of car accident he would have forced human interaction. I am not sure - I have little information.
So, right: if that is factual (it is unfortunately possible), to arrive to such degree of irrationality and abuse against clean, linear thinking and good sense, social media can only have a relative weight.
> Has Canada, a territory of extremely low population density, been under strict stay-at-home orders - prohibiting not "to see other people", but just to leave the house
It doesn't seem to be the case - during the Spanish flu pandemic, there was no central health authority and every municipality deal with it however they could, usually by shutting down everything non-essential and mandating masks. However the patchy response resulted in lots of deaths, and thus precipitated the creation of a federal health department.
As far as I can tell, lockdowns that were this widespread and restrictive have never been used before in history ever, the closest examples to them were during the medieval era but were still more targetted and limited in scope than these ones, and the narrative about them always having been used is itself a propaganda tool used to stop people questioning them.
> As far as I can tell, lockdowns that were this widespread and restrictive have never been used before in history ever, the closest examples to them were during the medieval era but were still more targetted and limited in scope than these ones
Yes, because usually up until present day they were used at the city-level, by city authorities. Why? Well, most epidemic-capable diseases came from trade, usually in port cities, hence quarantines and lockdowns of port cities. ( not to mention that countries and their administration were much less centralised, public health authorities didn't really exist)
But today, with air travel, and the much more connected nature of our existence ( people travel for leisure, a lot), combined with the specifics of the virus ( long incubation period, high chance of no symptoms whatsoever, high spreadability), made country-wide lockdowns a good idea.
Were they a bit too much in some cases? Of course. For instance in France, during the first wave there was a total lockdown, and public places like beaches and parks were closed. There were people complaining in the Brittany region, because they had zero cases ( apart from those transferred to their hospitals), and couldn't use their beaches which are huge and open air. Nonetheless, the risk that the virus "escapes" from hospitals, or that people from nearby regions travel there to use the regional exceptions, and spread the disease further was deemed to be too big. Because, again, many carriers are asymptomatic and the incubation period is rather long.
Ah yes, the asymptomatic aspect of Covid, a disease so deadly most people need to be tested to know they came near it.
How did the "connected" nature of our existence make it necessary to shut down entire countries, as well as the air travel links? My local playgrounds were officially closed until late into 2020 (obviously, I ignored that), as well as all sorts of other places that were obviously harmless. In fact, the worst place to go was hospital, where the infection rate was pretty bad.
It became obvious quite quickly who was at risk of Covid, and I do not understand why patients were not sent home for bed rest with a portable low-flow oxygen kit (as that was found to be the most effective treatment), and the rest of us allowed to continue with life as we saw fit.
> Ah yes, the asymptomatic aspect of Covid, a disease so deadly most people need to be tested to know they came near it.
Wow. Yes, because while you might have zero symptoms, you still spread it, and will probably infect multiple other people ( the so called R), especially without masks and other such precautions. Those people will infect many more in their turn. Among those, some will develop symptoms, sometimes heavy, and it's highly probable there will be people with comorbidities who can die even with abundant care, which isn't a given if hospitals are full from all those with heavy cases.
> My local playgrounds were officially closed until late into 2020 (obviously, I ignored that), as well as all sorts of other places that were obviously harmless
The point of those restrictions was to stop people from meeting, at all. Of course parks are a better place to be than a store, Covid-wise, but not if you gather in groups.
> How did the "connected" nature of our existence make it necessary to shut down entire countries, as well as the air travel links
People travel between cities, all around the world, daily. Whereas before there'd be a few traders going from Milan to Geneva in the space of a few weeks, now you have multiple daily trains with hundreds of people each. Don't you see how that changes the equation and how that helps spread a virus which is usually without symptoms ?
> The point of those restrictions was to stop people from meeting, at all. Of course parks are a better place to be than a store, Covid-wise, but not if you gather in groups.
So the idea of the citizen in these - sorry, _decadent_ - societies is not that of an educated, rational and reasonable (with voting rights) agent who will act responsibly and with appropriate proportionate care,
but that of an unreliable liability which will act with the property and wisdom of a problematic child. ("They could go in the wilderness but then they may mingle".)
A few of us will ask: so, where is dignified Society to be found nowadays?
If you're at risk of Covid, stay at home (which is behaviour very common in old folks anyway, during flu season). Frankly, even then your risk is very low. I know several people in their 90's who tested positive for Covid and survived just fine.
>The point of those restrictions was to stop people from meeting, at all.
Yes, the insidious and damaging idea that meeting people at all is dangerous, as we are all disease-ridden carriers of death. When I made a complaint at work that the Covid policies were making the workplace demoralising and miserable, the head of the Health and Safety committe specifically told me that government guidance was to "eliminate conversations". How is this at all healthy for us as a society?
You're also still taking about planes and trains, when I was asking how does that justify being literally shut in my house. Saying that, I understand your point of view. Covid is so bad, that absolutely no risk of passing it must be tolerated, and policy should be set accordingly.
When? Maybe a town or village got isolated, and becaome the "unclean" zone.
There is absolutely no precedent for putting entire countries under effective house arrest for months at a time, and for a disease with such a low mortality rate.
They were more local, more flexible, and were used to combat highly-deadly epidemics such as the plague or spanish flu. Such previous epidemics were more deadly, and were perceived as such by the local population, who therefore probably found the measures more justified.
Also, the 2020 quarantines arrived at a time where global resource inequalities were at unprecedented levels in human history, and when popular insurrections were growing across the planet (Liban, France, Soudan, etc), so they were interpreted (in my opinion, rightly so) as a political repression measure more than a sanitary measure... which was confirmed by the lack of sanitary measures from most governments, including the French government who during the pandemic cut public hospitals budgets by 800M€, continued to shut down hospital beds while the bodies were piling up, and covered up their failures (such as destroying the national mask stocks before the pandemic) via heavy propaganda campaigns.
Finally, opposition to the quarantines was fueled by how unevenly the measures were applied. Government officials and rich people have been publicly documented eating in restaurants and throwing parties, while common people like you and me were routinely beaten up by the police, fined or detained, for daring to go out and breathe fresh air (which here in France was illegal by decree for most of the 1st quarantine, before that was relaxed).
I don't think social media is entirely responsible for the growing conspiracy theories (Qanon) and other forms of popular opposition to quarantines, but they sure played a role in giving more facts to the population to know for sure the government can't be trusted to protect the local population (at least here in France).
> They were more local, more flexible, and were used to combat highly-deadly epidemics such as the plague or spanish flu. Such previous epidemics were more deadly, and were perceived as such by the local population, who therefore probably found the measures more justified.
Yes, previous epidemics were more deadly, but also easier to contain because:
1) cases were symptomatic
2) incubation period was lower
So the effectiveness of quarantines and lockdowns was much higher and easier to measure ( we have no more visibly sick people, and it's been like this for a week, everything is OK).
> Also, the 2020 quarantines arrived at a time where global resource inequalities were at unprecedented levels in human history, and when popular insurrections were growing across the planet (Liban, France, Soudan, etc),
I can't comment on Lebanon and Sudan, but in France you're flat out wrong.
There were the Gilets Jeunes, whose numbers were falling all through 2019 and were at less than 100k before the protests against the retirement reform, which were sometimes done in coordination [0]. In any case, the numbers for february are at 10-30k protestors, which is nothing for a country of 67 million inhabitants.
> which was confirmed by the lack of sanitary measures from most governments, including the French government who during the pandemic cut public hospitals budgets by 800M€, continued to shut down hospital beds while the bodies were piling up, and covered up their failures (such as destroying the national mask stocks before the pandemic) via heavy propaganda campaigns.
Again, you're flat out wrong. Hospital beds were reorganised and more emergency ones were added - this is why during the third wave hospitals in many regions were over "original capacity"; in Ile de France we got to ~140% if memory serves me right[1]. Mask stocks have been falling since 2009, so you can't pin that on the current government[2].
> Finally, opposition to the quarantines was fueled by how unevenly the measures were applied. Government officials and rich people have been publicly documented eating in restaurants and throwing parties, while common people like you and me were routinely beaten up by the police, fined or detained, for daring to go out and breathe fresh air (which here in France was illegal by decree for most of the 1st quarantine, before that was relaxed).
It wasn't illegal to go and breathe fresh air, there was just a distance limit from your home.
> but they sure played a role in giving more facts to the population to know for sure the government can't be trusted to protect the local population (at least here in France).
That's funny, because the government's approval was very high during the initial waves, and Macron's is still higher than before the pandemic[3]. Not only that, but he's the first one since Chirac to have such a high approval this late into his term.
Honestly i think the French government's action was among the best possible ( and obviously i'm not the only one if Macron's ratings are any indication); at any case, they were really trying to strike a fine balance. No lockdowns on the third wave, keeping schools open, financial help, etc.
Agreed, that is a major difference, that affects both body count and popular perception of the virus.
> There were the Gilets Jeunes, whose numbers were falling
Yet many polls agreed the gilets jaunes were as popular as ever. And if you think that dozens of thousands is a low number, can you name any other protest movement that has gathered so many people weekly for over a year? There was also a growing uproar about the new pension reform, the last of which back in 2010 led to the almost-collapse of the government (many petrol stations across the country were already out of fuel).
So my case is not that there was an actual revolution taking place in France, but rather that there were epicenters of insurrection which cost the State en private sector billions of euros: the gilets jaunes, the anti-5G movement, the ZADs, riots against police abuse in popular districts, growing and more coordinated strikes across all sectors. The elites tried to ridicule those movements (such as pretending the gilets jaunes were antisemites), then tried to repress them (including deploying armored military vehicles on the streets of the capital), but nothing killed the ideas so they were growing afraid of an actual revolution. They seized the pandemic as an excuse to reinforce social control on every level and make "acceptable" totalitarian measures while disseminating propaganda that the danger to you and your loved ones is your neighbor, not the State or the bosses. Some kind of anti-social opportunism, as described by Naomi Klein's Shock doctrine.
> Hospital beds were reorganised and more emergency ones were added
Reorganization is a word like reform, which means very little in itself but works fine in the mouths of neoliberal apparatchiks to downplay their tragic actions and their human cost. Also, you seem to be acknowledging it's possible to cut beds and at the same time expand "emergency ones" to appear like you're doing something good when you're in fact tearing down public service, so my point stands. "Look at this pie i baked just for you (while i was robbing your house)"
There were many health workers protests and strikes before and during the pandemic, denouncing the hypocrisy of the government's measures and exposing their terrible working conditions and the (bad) effects it has on patients. Are you saying these people (who know best because they talk about first-hand experience) are wrong and the government propaganda is right? I'm tempted to believe the health workers i've met who were severely burnt out and depressed (yet did their best every single day), rather than the psychopaths in power.
> Mask stocks have been falling since 2009, so you can't pin that on the current government
Oh i'm not blaming it on the current government. When i say the government, i liberally mean "those who hold power, whatever their party is". This was indeed a problem with the previous Hollande-formed government, but may i remind you that most of LREM (including Macron himself) were key players of that previous government? Whoever the head of this monstrous hydra, the result for the common people is the same: hard labor and unlimited suffering.
> It wasn't illegal to go and breathe fresh air, there was just a distance limit from your home.
On this specific point, you are wrong. The "going out for under 1h and less than 10km from home" checkbox on the laisser-passer forms was added late into the first confinement. For over a month, maybe more, it was illegal to go out just to breathe fresh air, unless you had a pet to walk (another checkbox).
> Honestly i think the French government's action was among the best possible
Breaking news: according to the french government propaganda in various news outlets controled by the State or private billionaires close to the State (Dassault, Lagardère, etc) i just read, the french government is the best government in the world. /s
Sarcasm aside, the government's actions and hypocrisies have been widely criticized, but the most striking fact about this whole pandemic is that the president single-handedly decided the fate and civil liberties of millions of individuals behind closed doors (the scientific community at large was not consulted, and when it occasionally was, it was ignored): do you think having a single unskilled individual announce surprise securitarian measures every other week on television is what we can call a democracy? It sounds like the very definition of a dictatorship.
Related: why are cops the only civil servants exonerated from wearing masks and getting mandatory vaccines? Why then are reactionary media fixated on the fact that lawless (non-white) proles in the suburbs are not civilized enough to respect the quarantine, and not addressing the elephant in the room? (it's a rhetoric question) It's a feature of authoritarian regimes than their armed hand (the police) needs to benefit from some forms of privileges, in order to keep the status quo intact.
Overall, we may agree or disagree on specific points, but i would recommend you check out more independent media sources every now and then to get a different perspective on things. There's only a handful of nation-wide independent publications left and they're worth encouraging: Mediapart.fr, CQFD-journal.org, reporterre.net. If you're more interested in popular analysis/discourse than professional journalism, i'd recommend medialibres.org, a planet [0] of various self-organized outlets for social critique.
Happy reading
[0] A planet, for the younger among us, is an aggregate of different RSS feeds. It's sort of like Google News, but you can setup your own to track the news sources of interest to you. For example, Planet Debian has a collection of blogs from the Debian ecosystem.
>Honestly i think the French government's action was among the best possible
Is that because you were relatively unaffected by the downsides of the various restrictions? It can't be because the overall Covid fatality rate is better in France, becase it's about the same as the UK.
No, it's because i think they made the mostly right choices and did around as best as they could given the circumstances and resources they had. Restrictions were imposed only when necessary, and adapted ( e.g. during the third wave there was a curfew, but no lockdown to minimise the economic effects). Communication was good and transparent. Overall I'd say I'd give them a 7.5/10 ( they could have done better, most notably in realising the gravity of the situation earlier on).
And as i said, the approval rating of Macron and his PM during the initial waves, Édouard Philippe, are much higher then before the pandemic, and literally unprecedented for a French president since moving to the current system ( 5 year mandates, etc.). The last French president with a similar approval rating was Chirac, and he passed away last year.
Comparing fatality rates between countries is complicated for a number of reasons ( weather, organisation of cities and families, customs ( e.g. french people used to kiss each other on the cheek when meeting, even complete strangers), age distribution, hospital capacity, medical reserves, etc.)
Yet France did no better in deaths per captia, than the "shambolic" UK, or Sweden, where life seemed pretty tolerable, nor most of the other EU countries, in fact. (Nor many developing countries that did very little to contain Covid, but I'm sure we will both agree we can't really rely on those figures).
It seems to me there is very little clear link between how a country responded, and the overall death count.
As i said elsewhere, comparing countries is complex due to a varietyof differences. The closer they are, the more fair rhe comparison will be. Sweden did much worse compared to its neighbours in a similar situation.
Well, you obviously were in a somewhat-privileged position to consider they made the best choices. For most of us, the quarantine was a hardship, especially for numerous families (many poorer people live with less than 5-10m²/person), people in situation of house abuse, persons with addiction problems or even with mental health issues (among which loneliness and depression can only be worsened by quarantine).
Also worth noting, while the richer classes were in their villas ordering food delivery service, the rest of us often had to wait in line for over an hour (the supermarket only took 5-10 people at a time) sometimes only to find empty shelves without toilet paper or pasta.
Then, because the hospitals didn't have any resources for the flow of patients, they actively triaged patients before they even reached the hospitals. There are many accounts of people dying or getting close to death because the emergency services refused to give them services, because they had strict directives to only care for people with specific symptoms.
Then of course, there's the "essential workers". The indispensable tiny hands of the capitalist machines. These have been the most exposed to the Covid and have ensured that private corporations such as Amazon profited more than ever during the pandemic, yet saw exactly 0 benefits from their hard and hazardous labor.
We could talk about food security. That official State-financed food banks (such as Les resto du coeur) closed their doors, at the same time that undeclared work came to a stop due to the confinement, leading the most precarious among us to actual famine. Many city halls and local non-profits had to improvise to deliver basic food for survival to millions of people, because the government and its vassals failed their job.
Finally, the government, to my knowledge, did not requisition the many resources at its disposal. I read that story about a clothing workshop from Paris who had to insist with the prefecture to be turned into a somewhat-official mask-producing facility.
So, what did the government do? Apart from tearing down our lives and profiting (in capital) from it? Apart from their theater plays on television to let us know there is no danger (yeah, they Chernobyled us again), masks are useless, and a strong racist police is the only weapon against the virus?
Typical. Those still exorting us that lockdowns were worth it, are those who did not feel the ill effects. Personally, lockdown as I experienced it here in Wales (which was particularly draconian and frankly absurd at times) was absolutely brutal on the social and emotional health of my family and those closest to me. I know one young family in particular who I don't think will ever be the same again. Combined with the almost complete lack of subjective evidence, as I go about my days, of any kind of deadly pandemic, you'll forgive me for my opinions.
Edit: Not forgetting the financial repercussions, which I suspect as a helpless taxpayer, will burden my family for the rest of my working life. The UK has already imposed a whole new tax, to try and dig the NHS out of the hole it is in.
Weren't there a lot of fearmongering whoppers of budget black holes, economic collapse, shortages and famine, increased risk of war, etc., coming out of remain? How do you judge which side lied more?
More like - Brexit has highlighted the state of our crumbling and badly-run domestic HGV industry, now that there isn't a pool of Eastern Europeans prepared to do the work for lower wages. Personally, I'm excited to see an industry given such a chance to redeem and re-structure itself for the better.
I didn't say there would be no positives or negatives to either side, I said there were lies from both sides. Which there clearly were.
I just find it strange that people think one side has the high ground because they didn't lie to the public quite so much, according to people who lied to the public.
This comment seems a bit flippant. The choice was distance learning (something) vs. close down schools entirely and... ban students from learning at all?
There was a pandemic and I think in many districts they made as good a switch to digital learning as they could and tried to be effective. Unfortunately we had a black swan event so its a bit disingenuous to act like "we never learn"
There was a pandemic that basically left kids untouched, and frankly barely registers on the scale of deadly pandemics for almost everyone else.
Let's at least be honest about it - the decision was made to avoid any risk of disease and close schools, and instead pass on the negative effects to those unable to prosper in the new learning regime. That is, those without private tuition, and/or a stable home environment with some kind of suitable space to focus on online learning. In my opinion, the education and welfare of children should be somewhere near the very top of any priority list, and in this case, we have utterly failed them in our scramble to be "Covid safe". Has anyone noticed that the near-retirement-age folks at the top of the power pyramid seem to be doing just fine, as they demanded everything be shut down to "protect" people like themselves? Fortunately, my kids are young enough that I may never have to tell them anything about this pandemic.
Edit: And do you know who will pay for all of this? Me, and people like me. I will be burdened with the societal and economic costs of this for the rest of my life, just because I have a decent enough job and a family I cannot fail.
It’s not flippant at all! People you know in real life would scream in your face if you dared challenge the idea that kids have to be in school. In fact you still see this now!
When the average person thinks getting covid comes with a 10% chance of dying… this crazy reaction starts to make sense. People are literally terrified out of their minds by covid.
Or do what Sweden did, and never close the schools at all, and still end up with overall mortality (across total population, not just kids) less than most US states.
Surely there was a third option of keeping schools open. I’m not a parent and am not sure whether that was the right option, but that your comment doesn’t even acknowledge it is part of the problem.
I know a headteacher from a fairly disadvantaged area in the UK. He said a lot of the kids will never recover.
Hopefully soon, it will no longer be contraversial to say that lockdowns (especially any that lasted longer than the initial "flatten the curve for 2 weeks" we were all promised) caused more harm than good.
For a (Western) society that is obsessed with helping the needy, it's just incredible that something that obviously would hurt the poorest very hardest was also something that could not be disagreed with.
This is almost impossible to quantify because we can't determine how the pandemic would have played out without lockdowns. It could have gone from 600,000 dead in the United States, to 2 million. (Again, we don't know, it could very well have been less than that, or more. :shrug:)
I would say losing parents or grandparents (any primary caretakers really) to COVID would be far more impactful on a child's development than missing a year of school.
I will gladly concede that lockdowns did cause harm, but "more harm than good" is something I'm still not seeing as true.
If it had been 2 million dead in the same period, it would still have been a fairly tame global pandemic, by the standards of deadly global pandemics.
It was pretty clear after the first few weeks that Covid was not the horrible killer that leaves people literally dropping dead in the streets, yet the response continued as if it were. Given the incredible disruption our response to it has caused, that I predict will continue for years and decades, the fact that we can't even say (and probably never will be able to) whether it was worth it, is damning enough.
Most kids lose a grandparent at a young age (I did). I really disagree that it was worse than losing a year of school, and being shut in the house for a considerable period of that. If anything, we have forgotten the lessons that death teaches us, and have lost touch with the cycle of life and death. The incredible aversion to a relatively harmless (for most) disease shows this is the case.
> the fact that we can't even say (and probably never will be able to) whether it was worth it, is damning enough.
Exactly. I assert that for any of these non pharmaceutical interventions to have been worthwhile their effect on “the charts” should be plain and dramatic. You should be able to pull anybody off the street and show them a lockdown state vs a non-lockdown state and have them see plain as day the profound difference.
If you need grad student level statistics to tease apart differences it means even if these things worked, their impact was so minor that the extreme social costs made them not worthwhile at all.
> You should be able to pull anybody off the street and show them a lockdown state vs a non-lockdown state
Keep in mind that the constitution protects free travel between states, so such an analysis only shows what results a mixed response gives.
If you compare Australia to the US, you can see that lockdowns very clearly do work: 1K vs 600K deaths. Even accounting for relative size, that suggests lockdowns produced a 50x effect.
(of course, if the question is "should California be draconian" then this is still very useful information! I'm just saying the answer changes depending on whether California is doing this while still being forced to have open borders with states that aren't locking down, or if the entire country coordinate a federal lockdown)
You cannot simply compare Australia's deaths to US deaths, "account for relative size" and then proclaim that lockdowns are responsible for a 99.99% decrease in deaths. There are countless other factors that have to be considered.
Please read the comment before replying. I said it suggests a difference, which is very different from proclaiming that there's definitely one. And I said 98%, not 99.99%.
The 50x difference is a starting point, not a declaration that there's no other factors.
Comparing Australia to anywhere else is a pretty weak argument. I mean for all you know their case count is way, way underreported. After all who wants to be “that guy” that shuts down an entire city? Who would ever get tested or be the doctor that recommends it?
And besides, look what they’ve done to their citizens basic human rights. Even if it works, is it worth it?
> I mean for all you know their case count is way, way underreported.
I work professionally with numerous cities in Australia, along with having friends and family there, so I don't have any particular reason to believe that under-reporting would produce a meaningful effect (keeping in mind that even if they were under-reporting by 10x, you'd still have a 5x result towards "yes, lockdowns work.")
I also follow a few scientists that track things like "rise in natural cause deaths" to look for under-reporting, and none of them has flagged Australia as a major concern.
> Even if it works, is it worth it?
That's a question we can only really ask after we've answered "does it work", but I agree it's an important one.
The thing is, "is it worth it" really depends on what the effect size is. If we can get that entire 50x reduction in deaths, that's amazing and I'd be hard-pressed to argue that the price they paid was too high for that.
But if we can get that 50x without such draconian restrictions, that's even better. And it's possible that over here we can't get anywhere close to that 50x because we can't do things like "completely close our borders" the way Australia can.
Moreso, I sincerely believe the fear exacerbated by the ridiculous measures and the social isolation especially of the vulnerable and sick (no visits etc.) caused a substantial proportion of the deaths. We are not isolated organisms.
Fear causes stress. Chronic fear causes chronic stress. Chronic stress causes chronic cortisol. Chronic cortisol causes immunosupression.
Indeed. And to flesh out in more detail, we caused:
- lack of sleep/exercise (which destroys the body's immunoregulatory capacities, leading to either a sort of acute immunosenescence like you said wrt fear, or alternatively leading to an overreactive immune system that kills via cytokine storm)
- decline in social interaction
- more time spent inside (which apart from the other correlates, very obviously leads to less sunlight). sunlight => vitamin d + nitric oxide; vitamin d is critical for respiratory pathology specifically, as well as just general health, and nitric oxide is very important as an immunoregulatory compound and as a preventer of strokes
- the general environment of fear/stress/anxiety (again, going to screw up the immunoregulatory balance of the body)
At least where I am (UK, and in particular, Wales), it seems our healthcare system is in the process of failing. It was already doing badly, and our response to Covid has tipped it over the edge. That alone will cause a significant amount of suffering and death.
I think this is being too light on the impact of covid. In places like NYC, where they had refrigerated trucks full of bodies because their morgues were full, or India where the oxygen shortage killed many many people from Delta infection...
I would argue the severe aversion in reaction to the news coming out of NYC wasn't unreasonable, even if it was an overreaction.
Hospitals and related services are optimized for efficiency, not flexibility. They don't like having empty beds that aren't being used, or idle workforces. So when something out of the ordinary happens they can't deal with it while maintaining their normal level of service. As a society we don't seem to want to pay for idle capacity. Human nature, I guess. We could have been building more hospitals over the last year, training more nurses, etc. But that doesn't appear to have happened.
I too saw the widely-circulated picture of the "open graves" in NYC. Somehow they forgot to mention it was just a regular picture of a pauper's graveyard. Funny what fear can be provoked by context-free visual imagery.
And that is what I found for almost all articles of that type. If you read into the article it was never “this is happening” but “we are getting prepared”.
I live in NYC and have a friend in the funeral business. This was absolutely true in the beginning of the pandemic, although perhaps not at every hospital in the city as some were hit harder with patients than others. There was also a backlog in the ability to process bodies (e.g. Getting death certificates, funerals, burial sites or cremations).
While the overall death rate isn't up that much, I've heard that it's clustering a lot more, which means various systems are overwhelmed: We can process X bodies per day but we have a couple weeks where we're getting 1.5X bodies, and so for a while we have a few bodies in refrigerated trucks or other overflow systems.
So... it's sort of true, but it's more of a congestion issue (like rush hour traffic), not a sign of systemic collapse.
I mean it kinda makes sense. Since the beginning we’ve lumped entire continents as a group to compare to another group. When instead this stuff is incredibly hyper localized. I’m pretty sure I’ve even heard “the experts” say this.
So according to that article, Covid so far has been 1/3rd as deadly as the Spanish Flu, yet any comparison drawn to the flu would elicit the response of "ITS NOTHING LIKE THE FLU, IDIOT!" ??
Interesting. I'm not downplaying the deadliness of Covid. The numbers speak for themselves.
Spanish Flu had a mortality rate of between 2% and 10%, and mostly killed healthy young adults. Estimates for Covid put its IFR somewhere aruond 0.4%, and it killed almost entirely elderly people.
The burden of proof is on those who promote the lockdowns as an effective strategy to show how they help. This is because without that proof, so many other issues arise from legal, ethical, and practical perspectives that make supporting it not just non-scientific, but also highly irrational.
Legally, what right do our nations have to shutter businesses as they did? Where in the legal frameworks do they legitimately yield such enormous & violent authority over us? Did they do enough to protect & compenate us all against these violations of our rights?
Ethically, is this even a moral way to conduct statecraft during a pandemic? Is scapegoating appropriate at a time like this, and were we right to erode so much of our monetary base to provide the benefits that states did to their citizenry, necessitated by the lockdowns in the first place?
And practically, how many people have been harmed or killed by the conditions of lockdowns? How many people committed suicide who otherwise wouldn't? How much industrial output was sacrificed and how did this impact the deaths of despair that rose considerably over the last 1.5 years? How many people didn't get their cancer detected early enough to survive it? How many people didn't get their emergency medical care due to the chaos caused by lockdowns and perished as a result? Did these figures remain low enough to make the actual policies of lockdown worth it?
I just want to say it out loud.
spookthesunset, __blockcipher__, AndrewUnmuted and everyone who shares the same sentiment and did speak up here - thank you all so much! You, folks, are the last straw I'm clinging onto, as the world goes down in a fiery mess. I would upvote all your posts, if I could. Keep speaking, you are saving lives! The amount of lies and outright hostility from everyone in any kind of power since the beginning of "pandemic" is absolutely unbearable now.
My family is under much-lauded, short-and-sharp, snap lockdown of over 230 days in Victoria, Australia. With 9pm curfew and 5km chain leash. Homeschooling three kids, oldest in y12 and youngest in kindy. We are being asked by the premier not to worry, the beautifully effective tools of lockdowns and curfews will be with us even after 80% of fully-vaxed. Masks will be mandatory for years to come. Contact tracing too. Riot police is as enthusiastic about enforcing 100% vaxx, as they were about zero-covid. By beautiful logic, because zero-covid is not attainable anymore, the "health advice" changed overnight and all the restrictions must ... stay the same! Until 100% vaxx, perhaps. Take no prisoners! And invitation-only "journalists" only ask "why not locking down earlier and harder"? I had a good friend confronting me with "you must be wanting to kill ten percent of 60+" and "feeling conspiratorial" when I said I do not support most of the actions taken.
I, personally, did step out of house only a handful of times during the last two years. Wearing facemask gives me acute psychosis. Seeing people wearing them makes me cry. I'm scared that I will start throwing punches if I see police or anyone enforcing this madness. There was no moment in the last two years when I did not feel anger, despair or complete apathy. I defy the curfew and walk my dog at midnight, in the middle of nowhere. If stopped, I plan on claiming "providing care", as it is one of the "allowed" reasons to break the curfew. If asked to whom, the answer will be "myself". I flip the police chopper when I see it loitering. Daily.
I gained 20 kilos, got myself a proper diabetes (I never even had elevated blood sugar before this), losing my eyesight, having chest pains and all that. My wife has been cut from minuscule support for a life-long medical condition, under premise that she is not successful enough in mitigating the symptoms of that condition. Apparently, the support is a reward now. We lost all trust in governments, police, doctors and all sorts of public service orgs. I absolutely not going to any medical place for checkup or vax until mandates are lifted. Which may be never or too late, so realistically I'm looking to meet my end long before my youngest reaches 18. By diabetes, covid, or by my own hand. There is no light. There is no escape. There is no place on Earth where we, realistically, could move. Heck, we cannot look at houses to buy in Vic, yet alone in another state. Cannot visit parents overseas, cannot invite them here. Cannot even send a parcel! There is no advice I could give to my sons. There is only regret that we chose Victoria, that we chose Australia, that we chose to have kids, that we were born at all. We've gone from normal, relatively positive and healthy people to complete wrecks in less than a year. So, however "worthwile" it was for the world, I guess my family will be dismissed as collateral damage.
I'm done for. My capacity to fight is gone. To those utilitarians, who are lockdown enthusiasts and covid evangelists - you may rejoice in knowing the world will be better without people like me. After all, it will raise the vaxxed percentage by decreasing the denominator. This is what we hear from all sides. The feeling that you killed a bunch of people to improve overall mortality statistics must be delightful. I wish you all to live forever with this feeling, cannot think of anything more horrible.
And the crazy part is we are right. Our positions are well grounded in data and plain common sense. In ordinary times a common person would completely agree with us. None of our stuff would be subject to so much, well, incredibly awful responses.
Why so many people, even the smartest most grounded people I know, flipped a bit and ignored both common sense and easily accessible data is really beyond me. I truly don’t understand how so many people can ignore what their own eyes and brains tell them.
This whole thing is really something else. It’s gonna piss people off to say it but… this is really the first true mass hysteria of the internet age and while it sucks to be a skeptic it is truly both an amazing and frightening aspect of human behavior to witness.
"Mass hysteria" is exactly what this is, and probably one of the greatest ones in history. I recently read "The Delusions of Crowds", written by E. Bernstein and published in 2021. Bernstein frequently notes that the author of the very well known "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", published in 1841 by Mackay and during the height of the British Railway Bubble, almost completely ignores that now well-known popular delusion.
Ironically, Bernstein had nothing to say about our response to Covid, and only occasionally parroted the accepted platitudes about the pandemic.
As someone who is pretty well read in Le Bon and crowd psychology I still think there are several key differences between traditional mass hysteria and the COVID response in certain countries.
The formation of large blocs of people who will not tolerate any dissent to the current state of Covid thought, and the scapegoating of those who question or do not fall in line, and a corresponding decline in the social, moral, and economic health of a country, certainly bear striking similarities.
I really feel for you. What kind of pandemic has turned huge numbers of formerly healthy people into overweight, demoralized, and socially isolated individuals? A pandemic of the mind, perhaps.
> This is almost impossible to quantify because we can't determine how the pandemic would have played out without lockdowns.
There is a wide spread of pandemic responses from different countries and regions, so yes, we can make pretty good guesses as to what the effect would have been.
All the various lockdown-supporting studies compare lockdowns to a do-nothing base scenario, where people are essentially assumed to be rolling around naked in a big heap, licking everything and everyone. This is completely false, because people everywhere acted on their own to protect themselves from spread.
And when you compare the effects of the decreased mobility due to ordered lockdowns vs. what people voluntarily achieve anyway, the effect is zero. No benefit, all harm.
Isn't that decreased mobility largely impossible without lockdowns though? I can't imagine more than 20% of workers would realistically have been able to stay home if their employers didn't have to lock down.
Absolutely not, because you could measure a substantial decrease in mobility before any region instituted a lockdown.
You can support working-from-home and furloughing without forcing it. And that's enough.
Last autumn in Sweden, cases started rising, still no lockdown, and people voluntarily decreased their mobility. Everyone I talked to decreased their social activity, skipped out on things, stayed home more. Without being told to. Without being ordered around. It's enough.
Shows the trend becomes clear on March 12th, which is 7 days before the first lockdowns in New York. Are you suggesting that the one week delay when everyone bought out all the toilet paper because they thought the world was ending is evidence that the lockdowns weren't needed to affect mobility?
Only in those useless models. I recall one interview on Unherd with one of the British modelers, if more people understood what kind of "science" this was hinged on there would be outrage.
I do understand, and I am outraged. The stastical modellers have given science, and particularly the public perception of science, a terrible blow, as well as the actual outcomes of blindly swallowing their predictions. I'm planning to put together a list of all of the predictions made since March 2020, and what actually happened.
Sweden was beating the "we're not restricting stuff!" drum for a while, but eventually they chickened out and locked down, just like everyone else, if not more. They are not a good example.
I live in Sweden. There were some restrictions on closing times of bars, and seating in shopping centres.
This is nothing compared to the "stay in your flat for a month" lockdowns in Italy and Spain. Or shutting almost everything in the UK, France, Australia, NZ, etc.
> was also something that could not be disagreed with.
At the time I recall significant disagreement on this point between politicians, the news media, the school boards in my area, and my neighbors. After much debate, our local public schools ultimately did decide to maintain full-in person school for as long as possible due in no small part to equity concerns. Everyone seemed uncertain about whether this was the right thing to do, and I don't recall anyone on either side insisting that disagreement was forbidden.
I was referring to the broader topic of lockdowns in general, but at least where I was, it was the narrative that "selfish" parents who "didn't want to look after their own kids" wanted to keep the schools open, and therefore risking the very lives of the teachers.
That's rough. Some of the discussions here also got heated and a couple people on both sides of the debate did sink to leveling personal attacks and questioning others' motivations, patriotism, intelligence, sincerity, empathy, etc rather than understanding their point of view. It's amazing how damaging it can be to have even a small number of people who have decided to abandon good-faith discussion.
I'm not sure how you prevent folks like that from getting a foothold, but seems like it's worth figuring out.
Disagreement with the narrative still gets you exiled in many parts. I’ve gotten called all kinds of extremely horrible things by people I know in real life just for asking basic questions. It’s really amazing what fear does to people.
Hell, I got a lecture from someone once for questioning whether cloth masks were accomplishing anything meaningful in a 100% vaccinated workplace with surveillance testing. A lot of authorities are concentrating more on appearing to Do Something against COVID than on the cost-benefit calculation of NPIs' actual impact on preventing disease.
The median age of death in many states was well above the average life expectancy of a healthy human. You’d never know this unless you bothered to check the state covid dashboard.
As an adult, you should have a basic grasp of things like knowing which societies have large social insurance programs and which do not, rather than being baffled by these basic facts of life.
Western society has a historically unique obsession with social insurance programs, to the point where between 20-30% of GDP is spent on social insurance, whereas in other socities the number is much lower. In fact the modern version of these programs were invented in Germany under Bismarck, and the ancient version in the Roman Empire with their bread dole. From the Roman Empire's 'dole' to the hospitals in the middle ages, there was a tradition in Western societies with having the government help the needy. That's not to say that individuals didn't help the needy in many different societies (begging was an occupation in early Islamic societies) but having organized government programs on a mass scale simply to help the poor was the invention of Western civilization during the Roman Empire and continued as a Western obsession to the present day.
Even in the US, the share of national wealth spent on social benefits is 19%, the dirty secret being not that the US spends much less than Europe on things like publicly funding healthcare and education (because the US government spends about the same amount as in Europe), but in the US those public funds are pocketed by well-paid professionals and still the private sector is left with large individual bills, whereas in Europe those same institutions have to get by on the public funds only.
If you want a quick way of shutting someone up who is arguing that the US should have European style funding of universities, tell them we already spend as much as they do in Europe with public subsidies, so the missing step is just making tuition and fees illegal with no increase in government spending. Same thing for healthcare. That will be a cold dose of reality.
"whereas in Europe those same institutions have to get by on the public funds only."
Europe isn't a homogeneous place and you have a lot of private healthcare and educational institutions here. They might not form a majority, but richer people will often make use of them, if they dislike the public option or consider it subpar.
Sometimes not even richer people. I know a lady in Madrid who does not make much money, but gives about half of her income for her son's schooling. He visits a semiprivate school where he gets reasonable education. In her own words, a fully public option would mean that he might not even learn proper Spanish, as only kids of the poorest immigrants frequent it.
Yes, this is a good point. Everything is messier in real life than a few paragraphs can properly portray.
But my main point is that the difference between the national healthcare you see in Europe versus the U.S. is not the level of public spending, but the universal nature of service delivery achieved for roughly the same total public spending. The same thing for university education.
In both cases, the government spends an enormous amount and in Europe that covers a baseline of service (with private spending optional to supplement it) but in the US that covers maybe 1/2-1/3 of your bill, leaving private citizens to still face huge costs for things that are fully covered in Europe. The natural solution -- to cut employment and wages on the part of US healthcare or education workers so that they make do with the public funds they are already receiving -- is rarely advocated by those who want a more european-style system of social insurance.
Are you for real? Find me another culture that spends so much time fretting over people suffering in other countries, or the poor or disadvantaged in their own countries (Covid polices exempted, of course).
Our elites just love flying round on jets to African countries to help, if you run a foundation you’re seen as a good person. The defining musical event of the 80s that still has cultural continuity today was Live Aid.
Most cities have food banks and soup kitchens too.
I think we still have a notion of “the right sort” of needy though, compare starving African kids to any of the wretched opioid addicts (and their families) that shuffle around North American cities and the sympathy given to each.
Yes, they can. This has been known since early in the pandemic.
And I'm supposed to believe it was absolutely necessary to shut myself in my house for months, and then not allow anyone else at all in my house for further months, yet Fluffy could wander around as they pleased.
It's the result of our response to Covid. Shutting down the entire global supply chain for months was certain to have dramatic effects, I'm just suprised it took this long.
I'm sure interested parties are also making full use of the chaos to futher their own ends.
>trapped by typhoons and Covid outbreaks that have worsened major congestion in the global supply-chain network.
Yes, I did. There is no way that the delicate machinery of international trade has already recovered - large parts of the world were still in lockdown last summer!
>For example cobalt is used for getting rid of sulfur in pretty large quantities as part of the oil refining process.
I don't know why this piece of misleading information is recently circulating so much.
By far the most common usage (63%, in 2020, and having grown from 20% in 2006)[1] of cobalt is for lithium battery electrodes (and that is despite the fact that EVs make up a miniscule percentage of cars on the road).
Cobalt is used as a catalyst in the petroleum industry, however its depletion rate is of the order of kg per millions of litres of fuel.
>Tesla recycles all their discarded cells. Why wouldn't they?
I'd like a source for that. The best I can find is that "Tesla say that 100% of their cells can be recycled".
That is true (as it is of any lithium-ion cell), but not in a way that makes any economic or practical sense.
It's not nothing; so it isn't misinformation. Also there are many other rare earths used for cars of course. The point here is that ICE proponents get all green and hippy like when it comes to EVs but are not willing to talk rare earth sourcing when it comes to ICE engines, fuel production, etc. It's called selective bias. The reality is that ICE vehicles contain a wide variety of materials. Ice vehicle recycling is mostly focused on extracting steel and aluminium however.
Cobalt specifically is also becoming less relevant for EVs in any case because more recent batteries use less of it; or none at all in some cases. Like for example the solid state batteries discussed in the article.
Regarding recycling, Tesla is working with third parties as well as working on in house expertise:
You need economies of scale for battery recycling to become more significant. One minor challenge here is that batteries seem to last a lot longer than people expected a few years ago. Supply of used up batteries is simply not there yet. Mostly the industry is still focused on recycling batteries from laptops, phones, etc. So, not an urgent issue for Tesla to be working on yet. But there are of course plenty of startups in this space as it is such an obvious thing to start doing in the next decade. J.B. Straubel, the Tesla co-founder, just got a nice investment of 700$ million for one of those companies. So, very practical and lucrative apparently.
I could nitpick over your definition of "a very large amount of cobalt is used in petroleum refining", but the fact that an EV owner creates orders of magnitude more demand for cobalt than an ICE car owner speaks for itself.
>Ice vehicle recycling is mostly focused on extracting steel and aluminium however.
What other rare earths are present in an ICE car's engine? They are almost entirely comprised of alu and steel, which is why recycling them is so easy. Platinum is also very widely extracted from old catalytic converters.
Obviously modern cars also include a huge amount of (almost entirely un-necessary) electronics, but if you want to start talking about that, then we'll also have to include all of the other (almost entirely un-necessary) electronics we own.
Nice article on Tesla and battery recycling. Exactly which part supports your previous assertion that "Tesla recycles all of its batteries"?
>You need economies of scale for battery recycling to become more significant.
I get a feeling we'll be hearing this line for a long time.
"kg per millions of litres of fuel" we consume lots of fuel, if 1kg per million liter that's between 5 and 6 thousands metric tons of cobalt per year. number two cobalt producer is russia with 6 thousand metric ton per year (first is DR Congo with 100 thousand metric ton).
Also rare earth are present in fossil fuel cars (Catalytic converter amongst other pieces):
I did the computation because I just learned about this cobalt use for fossil cars (thanks to HN !) and wanted to check if it was significant or not.
On your comment:
- Cobalt (and CO2 and other chemicals) from fossil car is lost as pollution, cobalt from car batteries will be recycled (cheaper than mining) - even if recycling losses will likely be near in magnitude to fossil losses in the case of Cobalt.
- Typical EV batteries are not 100 kWh
- Tesla Model 3 SR+ MIC have 0 cobalt since use LFP chemistry. Tesla said it will use LFP for all entry level cars in the near future, and no longer use cobalt
- You didn't address the point about rare earth media coverage for fossil cars vs EV
My take on the last one: given that the company currently owning 75% of the BEV market in the USA doesn't pay mass media for advertisement at all, given that fossil car maker spend lots and lots of money for advertisement (in the 10% of car value range), mass media has massive incentives to paint EV in a negative way and it what's they're doing since the beginning.
Sure, cobalt can be recycled from EV batteries (it's one of the few things that is currently economical to extract, and even then, only if the batteries are essentially incinerated first). At around 98% recovery, that means you'd lose about as much cobalt as an ICE-driving person would consume over that same period. However, it doesn't help the fact that every EV currently needs around 10kg of the stuff in the first place, so that all has to come from somewhere.
>Typical EV batteries are not 100 kWh
For these order-of-magnitude calculations, it doesn't matter if we're talking about a 100kwh battery or a 75kwh battery.
>Tesla Model 3 SR+ MIC have 0 cobalt since use LFP chemistry.
LFP might have some nice properties, but it has around 2/3rds the energy density, and poor temperature performance. I'm sure you'll tell me "it'll get better", but then it looks to me like we're going to continue buying many generations of EVs with the promise that "the next one will fix everything!".
>You didn't address the point about rare earth media coverage for fossil cars vs EV
Why is that an issue? ICE cars don't use much in the way of rare earths, and certainly not until de-sulphurisation became a thing (which is predominately for diesel, anyway), and catalytic converters became mandated.
Once we're done talking about cobalt, we can move on to all the rare earths in an EV's traction motor...
>“Congresswoman, My daughters are five and three and they do not use our products. Actually that is not exactly true my eldest daughter, Max, I let use Messenger Kids sometimes to message her cousins,” said Mr Zuckerberg.
Get those phones out of your kids hands. Socially, they are growing up on a diet of sugar.